One of the most influential thinkers within New Age consciousness
is Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), whose impact
lingers long after his death. The modern movement known as Jungism still
attracts many because of a perceived spirituality. But it is an anti-Christian
spirituality which relies upon naturalistic evolution and neopaganism.

The son of a minister, Jung rejected
Christianity in 1912 and embraced the polygamous beliefs practised by Dr Otto
Gross. Jung went on to promote his own cult religion of rebirth and
individuation, and told the story of his own ‘deification’ in 1925.

Jung was profoundly influenced by the writings of Ernst
Haeckel, the German professor of zoology and zealous nineteenth century
evolutionist, and especially by Haeckel’s so-called Biogenetic
Law.1 Haeckel’s infamous concept of ‘ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny’ was shown early in the 1900s to be false, and now has few
supporters. Nevertheless, the idea of recapitulation has served as an
important vehicle in evolutionary mythology, and it made a great impact
on Jung.

In a frank treatment of Jung’s life and ideas, Richard Noll
describes how Jung’s views changed markedly during his life, but evolution
remained central to his theories about existence and meaning. Spiritualism
and evolutionary biology formed the basis of his psychoanalysis theories
which were intended to replace Christianity.2

As for the adverse impact of evolutionary theory upon modern
belief systems, it is sobering to reflect upon how Jung finally rationalized
away any lingering Christian prohibitions against mistresses:

‘What did Jung discover about himself in [Otto]
Gross? … Perhaps the natural state of humans who were civilized
only in the last few thousand years after a million or so of evolution
was indeed the primal polygamy of our ancestors … only suited
for tribal life in a small Gemeinschaft [community] of hunters
and gatherers … this notion of biologically based polygamous impulses
from an ancestral past as a major determinant of human social behaviour
[is] gaining scientific ascendancy in the work of sociobiologists and
“evolutionary personality psychologists” in the 1990s.’3

Jungian theory and mystical New Age
concepts are still widely influential, with exaggerated emphasis being made
on personality types and the meaning of feelings.

Evolution and Freud

Jung was not the only thinker profoundly influenced by evolutionary
beliefs. Within the psychoanalysis movement which arose in the nineteenth
century, evolutionary beliefs were central to theories developed by Austrian
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and his colleagues, disciples
and foes. Belief in recapitulation theory and inheritance of acquired
characteristics (Lamarckianism) were of crucial importance in stimulating
theories about supposed ancestral behaviour now affecting modern human
beings.

The ideas of committed evolutionists such as Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck, Alfred Russel Wallace, Ernst Haeckel, and Charles Darwin made
an enormous impact on late nineteenth century society. Darwin was also
a major early figure in the growing science of the mind later developed
more fully by Freud and others.

Darwin’s belief that man had descended from lower animals
led him to delve into the evolution of intelligence and the origin of
instincts and emotions—hence his 1872 book The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals, published one year after The Descent
of Man. Frank Sulloway has shown just how much Freud owed to Darwin’s
earlier speculation:

‘Darwin’s [M and N] notebooks
touch repeatedly upon unconscious mental processes and conflicts; upon
psychopathology (including double consciousness, mania, delirium, senility,
intoxication, and a variety of other psychosomatic phenomena); upon
the psychopathology of everyday life (for example, forgetting and involuntary
recall); upon dreaming (Darwin records three of his own dreams and subjects
them to partial psychological analysis); upon the psychology of love
and the phenomena of sexual excitation … and upon the evolution
of the aesthetic sense, of morality, and of religious belief.’4

Darwin’s strong influence

Thus, the influence of belief in evolution upon the early
developing psychoanalysis movement cannot be overemphasized. In addition
to Freud and Jung, many other theorists developed themes which derived
from evolutionary recapitulation/Lamarckian perspectives. Darwin’s
influence was all-important:

‘It is certainly fitting that the influence of Charles
Darwin, the man whose evolutionary writings did so much to encourage
young Freud in the study of biology and medicine, should have been so
instrumental in turning psychoanalysis into a dynamic, and especially
a genetic, psychobiology of mind. Indeed, perhaps nowhere was the impact
of Darwin, direct and indirect, more exemplary or fruitful outside of
biology proper than within Freudian psychoanalysis. Yet it was not until
Freud had freed himself from the quest for a neurophysiological theory
of mind that he finally began to reap the full benefits of this Darwinian
legacy within psychoanalytic theory. By then—the late 1890s—Darwin’s
influence upon Freud’s scientific generation had become so extensive
that Freud himself probably never knew just how much he really owed
to this one intellectual source … Freud, toward the end of his
life, recommended that the study of evolution be included in every prospective
psychoanalyst’s program of training.’5

Much emphasis was placed in the early developing psychoanalysis
movement upon human behaviour being explicable primarily in sexual/evolutionary
concepts. Indeed, without such naturalistic evolutionary underpinning,
it is hard to see how Freudian psychoanalysis could even exist.’6

Unfortunately for Freud and his colleagues, disciples, and
foes within the psychoanalysis movement, both recapitulation theory and
Lamarckian acquired characteristics came to be widely seen as erroneous
scientific beliefs and were eventually abandoned by almost everyone.

Freud himself refused the urging of colleagues to accept
this bad news, and instead continued to cling thereafter to belief in
recapitulation theory and inheritance of acquired characteristics. The
prospect of being shown to be completely mistaken about such cherished
lifelong evolutionary beliefs was obviously too painful for him to accept.

Footnotes

Known otherwise as Recapitulation Theory, this ‘Law’
holds that an organism’s embryological development (i.e. its ontogeny)
repeats (or recapitulates) the stages of the adult form of its ancestors.
Haeckel is known to have falsified some of the pictorial evidence for
his theory. (See Russell Grigg,
Ernst Haeckel: Evangelist for evolution and
apostle of deceit, Creation18(2):33–36, March–May
1996.)